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Tag: female

Tall and slim, with long, blond hair, Deborah Richard could look like an expensive call girl or a bag lady. She could wear an auburn wig and heavy makeup and look like a hooker. She could be the perfect ditz or the perfect waitress.

But it was quick thinking that made Las Vegas’ first female FBI agent an undercover success. She started undercover work through assignments at the Huntington Beach Police Department, her first law enforcement job. Once she posed as a model and would-be hooker and convinced a man the wire he felt was a pacemaker. She was in her early 20s at the time.

After the FBI recruited her, Richard came to Las Vegas in 1977 and for two years worked undercover doing surveillance and gathering intelligence in the bureau’s intense effort to indict Tony Spilotro, the Chicago mob’s watchdog in Las Vegas. She was 27 but looked younger.

“A lot of my work was being a fly on the wall,” she said.

She will be on the Mob Museum’s Nov. 7 panel discussing what was real in the movie “Casino” about Spilotro, mob associate Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Rosenthal’s wife (and Spilotro’s lover), Geri.

Richard, who has retired to Las Vegas, shocked me Sunday when she said Geri had also been a source for the FBI, which is not the same as a top echelon informant like Rosenthal and didn’t require a paper trail.

Richard knew this because she worked with the late FBI agent Al Zimmerman, who worked with both Rosenthals. Richard said sometimes Zimmerman met with both Rosenthals the same night, without each other’s knowledge.

While preparing for the museum panel, which includes former Mayor Oscar Goodman, she told him Geri was a source for the FBI. He was stunned, she said.

A recruitment effort to hire more women into Border Patrol is paying off as CBP announced recently that it received applications from 5,500 female applicants, Federal News Radio 1500 AM.

The agency’s ranks of 21,000 agents only include about 5% women.

CBP wants more female agents, partly because more women are crossing the border.

“As a police chief for a long time, I know that women in law enforcement bring a huge amount of positive to any law enforcement agency, and increasing those numbers for the border patrol will do exactly the same thing,” CBP Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said.

“The real goal, of course, is that we needed to increase the numbers at all the levels, all the ranks, and throughout the border patrol of women, because of all of the skills that they bring to the job,” he said.

The FBI is changing that definition to include sexual assault of males, USA Today reports.

“Under the current definition, established 85 years ago, many of the sex crimes alleged in the ongoing prosecution of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky would not be counted in the bureau’s Uniform Crime Report, one of the most reliable measures of crime in the United States,” USA Today’s Kevin Johnson writes.

USA Today reports that the rape is currently defined as “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.”

U.S. Atty. Diane Humetewa

By Allan Lengelticklethewire.comWASHINGTON — The first female Native American to serve as a U.S. Attorney is expected to soon step down, according to Indian Country Today.

Indian Country Today newspaper reported that U.S. Attorney Diane J. Humetewa of Arizona will step down ” not because she’s doing a bad job, either. Instead, she will become a casualty of the political appointee process that comes with each new presidential administration.”

At the time of her appointment in December 2007 “Indian country found big reason to celebrate”, the publication noted.

The publication said that many of the U.S. Attorneys who were fired during the Bush years were “strong in the area of tribal justice”. It said Humetewa helped to fill that void.

Her replacement is expected to be Dennis Burke, a former aide to then Gov Janet Napolitano, who now heads up the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.